by Noah Savage, of Williams College
Mongolia Study Abroad – Fall 2019 semester
How do I leave a home, make a new one, then pack that one up again? Can I carry home with me while I travel? Over this past week and a half, as the group and I travelled northwest from Ulaanbaatar to our basecamp in the Darhad Valley, we may have undergone a similar experience and asked ourselves similar questions as the traditionally nomadic herders of Mongolia.
The group carries their bags to the Ulaanbaatar train station.
Our trip began with an overnight train north to the mining city of Erdenet. More specifically, it began with me standing stiffly, my face drained of emotion and bowels clenched in the train hallway, afraid the slightest relaxation would betray me. I stared frozen at a small sign on the bathroom door:
“Train bathrooms open a half hour after the train leaves the station.”
I waited deep in meditation, attempting to disassociate my mind from my bodily needs. From up the hallway of the train car, Lonnie poked his head out of the cabin and waggled his thumb from down to up, checking in. No sooner had I returned an uncertain, trembling horizontal thumb than a train attendant finally glided through the car to unlock the door and offer merciful release. Lightened and sprightly, I almost skipped back to our cabin. There, as I beheld the seven other members of the group clustered in the train cabin to watch a zombie movie and heard the warm congratulations they offered me, I felt witness to the start of a transformation from an assortment of strangers to something closer knit.
Micah and Sophie in the train cabin.
Over the course of the next 48 hours of travel, confined in many tight spaces for long periods of time, I felt the group coalesce even more fully. The next small space came immediately after exiting the train early the next morning. Two Mongolian drivers, Chinbold and Palchi, were waiting for us at the Erdenet station with a furagon, a Soviet van largely unchanged from the 40’s, perfect for the rugged Mongolian landscape, and a land cruiser. We piled in and got settled for a full day drive to the shore of Lake Khuvsgul to the northwest of Erdenet. The rattling was already noticeable on the paved road to the lake, giving us but a taste of the next day’s offroad drive into the Darhad.
Klara nesting in the furagon.
From the bottom of the lake we took a small boat northwards to where we would spend the night. Here, the group piles onto the boat that would take us up part of Lake Khuvsgul to Tumursukh’s camp.
We spent that night on the shore of the lake, sleeping in gers at a tourist camp belonging to Tumursukh, the director of the national park in which we would be researching. The immense, clear lake was ringed by boreal forest and wave-smoothed rocks, reminding me of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After a short hike up a nearby hill to look across the water, we spent the evening heating up in the camp’s sauna and plunging in the freezing lake.
The group, leaders, Mongolian hosts, and our drivers arriving at the lake camp.
Sophie milking a cow at Tumursukh’s Khovsgul lake camp, with Micah hot on her heels.
The next morning, we took the boat back the base of the lake and prepared for our drive into the Darhad valley. After an hour or so on asphalt, the drivers pulled off the road onto a barely visible dirt track. We would not see paved road for the next eleven weeks, but every minute we rolled further from pavement reaffirmed our choice of study abroad. While seated in the furagon, many of us agreed that what drew us to this program was the utter separation from our lives. The remoteness itself was the goal.
On the drive up to the Darhad, we stopped to help free the van of a stranded driver.
A pee/fixing broken suspension break in the furagon. Furagons break down often, but their ability to be easily repaired in the field makes them an attractive vehicle choice. Furagon drivers carry a set of basic tools with them and are constantly repairing their cars as the rough roads shake them to pieces, waging an eternal war against entropy.
The group arrives at the entrance to the Darhad Valley. At the top of this pass were a series of ovoos, rock mounds marking a point at which humans can communicate with the landscape and the spirit world. We circled them three times, contributing food and stones to the mounds to pay our respects and ask for a successful and safe semester.
The novelty of driving up 45 degree slopes and across boulder-filled streambeds never quite wears off, but by the end of the 8 hour drive we were desperate for solid ground. With bones jellified and brains scrambled by the endless rattling, we were happy to pour out at the ranger station in the town of Ulaan Uul in the Darhad Valley. We were met by Tumursukh and several other park employees, and we were immediately offered tea, fried bread, candies, and homemade cranberry juice. Tumursukh single handedly manages three parks with a combined area larger than Yellowstone with only 40 employees, so it was hugely meaningful he took the time to greet us. I did not anticipate the investment in us on his part, nor the incredibly privileged access to the parks we were offered. I had many reasons to choose this program, but I did not expect a core motivation for my research to become a sense of responsibility towards providing Tumursukh valuable information with which to help manage his parks.
After spending the night in the ranger station, we collected our things the next morning for the short drive out of town to basecamp. There, we settled into a new home, but we did so with far more familiar companions. While we travelled, we had already established part of our home; the social bonds that would support us and encourage us and cheer us on when we pooped. Not only can home travel with you, travelling can help create it.
The group arrives at camp and has a first lunch.